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U.S. news media is experiencing a cognitive meltdown as it tries to hold
onto the traditional view of the United States as a beacon for human
rights while facing the new reality in which George W. Bush has plunged
the nation into the dark arts of torture, assassination and
disappearances more common in death-squad states.

Rarely has that disconnect been more clearly on
display than on the Feb. 28 editorial page of the Washington Post.

The lead editorial, entitled Homicide
Unpunished, criticizes the Bush administration for letting off U.S.
interrogators implicated in murder and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the
pages final editorial hails the Bush administration for demanding that the
United Nations purge its human rights organization of human rights violators.

That final editorial, entitled Prodding
the U.N., reads like something written from the not-so-distant past when
the United States could credibly point fingers at nations with poor records for
respecting civil liberties and human rights.

The administration refused to accept a proposed structure
for this new (U.N. human rights) body, reasonably fearing that it would protect
human rights abusers rather than put pressure on them, the Post said, listing
those offending nations as Zimbabwe, Sudan, China and Cuba.

The Post added that Washington should confront allies, such
as Pakistan and Egypt, and tell them that relations with the United States will
be affected if they resist a serious U.N. human rights body.

The Big Elephant

Leaving aside the question of whether some of these U.S.
allies have appreciably better human rights records than the countries on the
Posts list, the editorial also ignores the bigger elephant in the room, whether
Washington retains the moral standing to lecture anybody about respect for human
rights and international law.

After all, just six inches above the editorial praising
Bushs human rights position at the U.N. is the other editorial describing how
the Bush administration gave only slaps on the wrist to interrogators implicated
in torturing detainees to death since 2002.

Indeed, the hypocrisy within this hypocrisy is that the
only serious jail time has been meted out to the Abu Ghraib guards who were
photographed posing Iraqi prisoners naked in humiliating postures but didnt
kill anyone.

The lead Post editorial notes that Corporal Charles A.
Graner Jr., who supervised Private Lynndie England and other guards on the Abu
Ghraib night shift, did appear in one photo with a dead Iraqi prisoner, but
Graner wasnt responsible for the mans murder.

Nevertheless, the sexually-oriented photos of naked Iraqis
had infuriated President Bush and many Americans in his Christian Right base, so
Graner got 10 years in jail and seven other low-level guards, including England,
also were sentenced to prison.

By contrast, the Navy SEAL and CIA interrogators who
tortured to death Iraqi Manadel al-Jamadi (the victim in the Graner photo) were
spared any serious punishment. On Nov. 4, 2003, the interrogators had taken
turns punching and kicking Jamadi before shackling him and hanging him five feet
off the floor, where he died of asphyxiation.

Nine members of the Navy team were given nonjudicial
punishment by their commanding officer; the 10th, a lieutenant, was
acquitted on charges of assault and dereliction of duty, the Post wrote. None
of the CIA personnel has been prosecuted. The lead interrogator, Mark Swanner,
reportedly continues to work for the agency.

The Rule

The Jamadi case also wasnt an exception; it was the rule.
A
new report by Human Rights First documented that only 12 of 98 deaths of
detainees in U.S. custody have resulted in any punishment for implicated U.S.
officials. Even in the eight cases when the deaths have resulted from torture,
the stiffest penalty was five months in jail.

The report documents many of these cases in devastating
detail, the Post noted. There is, for example, the case of former Iraqi Gen.
Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who in November 2003 was beaten for days by Army and CIA
interrogators, then stuffed into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord
and smothered.

The case was classified as a murder, but only one person
was court-martialed, a low-level warrant officer. After arguing, plausibly, that
his actions were approved by more senior officers under a policy issued by the
then-commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, his punishment was to be
restricted for 60 days to his home, workplace and church.

Human Rights First reported that in dozens of prisoner
deaths, grossly inadequate reporting, investigation and follow-through have
left no one at all responsible for homicides and other unexplained deaths.

The Post editorial traced this pattern of brutality and
neglect all the way to the top. Commanders, starting with President Bush and
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and extending through the ranks, have
repeatedly declined to hold Americans accountable for documented war crimes,
the Post wrote.

The defacto principles governing the punishment of U.S.
personnel guilty of prisoner abuse since 2002 now are clear: Torturing a foreign
prisoner to death is excusable. Authoring and implementing policies of torture
may lead to promotion. But being pictured in an Abu Ghraib photograph that leaks
to the press is grounds for a heavy prison sentence.

While this disparity between punishments given the Abu
Ghraib night shift and the more lethal work of CIA and military interrogators
cant be disputed, the other disconnect  demonstrated by the two Post
editorials both appearing on Feb. 28  may be harder to explain.

Even as the world looks on in horror  as the United States
eviscerates its reputation for promoting human rights  the Post and other U.S.
news outlets cling to the now-outdated notion of America as the undisputed human
rights champion when it lectures the U.N. on how to isolate human rights
abusers.

What the Post editorial board cant seem to get its brain
around is that the United States might now fit better in the category of abusive
states, the ones that Bush wants excluded from the new U.N. human rights
commission. Otherwise, that new body  like its predecessor  might lose all
credibility.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra
stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at
Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine,
the Press & 'Project Truth.'